Obama judicial doctrine: The leftier the better
As the nation’s attention focuses on Elena Kagan, conservatives must not lose sight of the rest of the judiciary. When it comes to nominees to the federal bench below the Supreme Court level, President Obama has offered up some doozies.
James R. Copland at NRO
As NRO’s Greg Pollowitz pointed out on Tuesday, in 1986, the Democrats in the Senate were so focused on attacking William Rehnquist — whom Ronald Reagan had chosen to elevate to chief justice of the Supreme Court — that they made nary a noise about Reagan’s pick to succeed Rehnquist as an associate justice. Thus it was that Antonin Scalia was confirmed to sit for life on the highest court in the land with 98 senators in favor, and none against.
It’s incumbent on those of us who care about the judiciary to keep this in mind as the nation’s attention focuses on Elena Kagan. Only a tiny fraction of cases decided by the appellate courts are granted review by the Supreme Court, which means that those lower appellate benches are usually the courts of last resort in the federal system. And because so many cases never make it even that far, federal trial courts wield enormous power, too.
When it comes to nominees to the federal bench below the Supreme Court level, President Obama has offered up some doozies. Those who spend much time at NRO’s Bench Memos blog should be aware of my law-school classmate Goodwin Liu, whom the president has tapped for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Liu is a dyed-in-the-wool lefty who saw fit to attack the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, in bombastic and disingenuous fashion, on wholly ideological grounds. The Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider his nomination this morning.
But you’d have to be paying close attention to know about two of the president’s craziest choices for the federal district courts, Wisconsin’s Louis Butler and Rhode Island’s Jack McConnell.
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